On the Fear of Going Home

 

By Maria Chaves Daza

 

I made a choice to be queer […]. One of the students said, ‘I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after residency.’ And I thought how apt, fear of going home and not being taken in.” — Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 19-20.

I was born in Bogotá, Colombia before moving to the United States. I grew up in Miami, moved to Chicago for undergrad, and currently live in upstate New York. I am a feminist. I am queer. I am pro-Black. I am an academic. I am afraid to go home.

I arrived in Miami at the age of eight and I was raised in Hialeah, a working-class area of the city mostly populated by Cuban immigrants and their descendants with pockets of Colombian, Dominican, and other diasporic Latin American communities. I went to a magnet high school with students from Haiti, Jamaica, Nicaragua, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Korea, and Japan, in short, a global consortium of diasporic peoples. Anyone who leaves Miami or visits Miami from another place in the country can attest to that fact that Miami doesn’t feel like the rest of United States. Miami is more an extension of the Caribbean than any other “American” city. Miami is special because diversity and homogeneity live side by side. The group of cities that we refer to as “Miami” resemble something like the boroughs of NYC—satellites to a small geographical area close to Calle Ocho, highly segregated by race/class, and rapidly gentrifying to satisfy the voracious desires of the 1% for ‘cultural” capital and the aspiration to “live where people vacation.”

The reality is you can go anywhere in Miami and never have to speak a word of English, and if you do, sometimes people will feel offended and roll their eyes, accusing you of being “creida” or “gringa.” You don’t even have to be Latinx to be accused of this, if you look the part, as one of my Arab friends, a stateless woman from Kuwait, who visited me found out. These accusations are for not speaking Spanish. For example, when picking up colada and guava pastelitos at La Carreta, a large Cuban food chain restaurant, the woman at the counter assumed my friend was Puerto Rican, and spoke Spanish to her without a second thought. When she couldn’t answer and said she didn’t speak Spanish, they rolled their eyes. I stepped in and explained, “ella es arabe, no habla español,” and they responded with surprise, “ah-ja, no parece!” Even with my explanation she didn’t believe me. Hialeah is one of the least diverse cities in the country, most of the population is Cuban, so interacting with a Kuwaiti is unheard of and so every one of my visits, especially with friends from elsewhere, are a reminder of how small a place can seem once you leave.

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The homogenization of all areas of Miami continues with the immigration of Venezuelans to areas like Doral and Weston. The gentrification du jour and the global pandemic, further expanded the tourist economy that has tried to eradicate historically working-class and poor Black neighborhoods like Overtown, Liberty City, and Little Haiti as it did in Coconut Grove in the mid-20th century. As noted in Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City, middle- and upper-class Latin American immigrants and exiles have benefited the most from these structural changes. White/mestizx Latin American communities continue the segregation patterns that shape Miami and mark the class/access differences between Black Caribbean communities (English and French Caribbean), Afro Latinx communities concentrated in Black neighborhoods like Carol City, Opa-locka, Allapatah, and North Miami.

I left Miami in my early 20s and moved to another immigrant city: Chicago. As I learned about the immigrants in Chicago, their activist histories, their struggle to organize and build coalitions, I became disillusioned with Miami. My relationship to Miami changed drastically because of Chicago. I was at many of 2006 immigrant marches. On the way to the largest one on May Day, the buses were packed and had to stop their routes earlier than expected because there were so many people in the streets. I walked several dozen blocks to reach the epicenter of the march. This experience shaped me, it moved me to be in community with so many people in such a large city where loneliness is more common. In Chicago I found a new name for myself. I became a Latina; I found community among feminists, women of color, and Chicanxs and immigration organizers. As M. Jacqui Alexander states, “We are not born women of color. We become women of color” (269). I adopted a commitment to learning about women of color histories and learned to

resist and unlearn an impulse to claim first oppression, most-devastating oppression, one-of-a-kind oppression, defying comparison oppression […] unlearn an impulse that allows mythologies about each other to replace knowing about one another […] a way of knowing in which we direct our social, cultural psychic and spiritually marked attention to each other (Alexander, 269).   

I learned how to organize to address problems in my community and began to practice coalition. Away from Miami, I found my commitment to thinking about what was happening around me, to caring about other folks, and to building intentional politically engaged communities.

In Miami, when people ask you where you’re from, it is common to claim your parent’s nationality. It’s the easiest answer. Taking on the Latinx label was a process of coming to consciousness about collational politics, one that continues to evolve. Recently, when the call to cancel Latinidad erupted on social media (#latinidadiscancelled), I had to stop to consider what this identity meant to me, and how its legacy in the U.S. also engages in anti-blackness, white supremacy and heteropatriarchal domination as Alan Pelaez Lopez discusses in their essay “The X in Latinx is a Wound not a Trend.” This pan-identity is just as implicated in the erasures of Black, Indigenous, and trans/queer genocide. The umbrella term, with its complicated history, is a wound inflicted by the legacy of colonialism that insists on separating us. One encouraging us to deny the legacy of Africa in Latin America and the violence it takes to obfuscate it. People from Latin America and those who have named ourselves Latin_s have to unlearn and relearn our own and this continent’s histories: “We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other’s company” (Alexander 269). We can guide our journey to “home” through women of color and their politics of relation, solidarity, and coalition and by being against segregation and hierarchies of oppression we remember to “reject the impulse to claim first oppression,” even more so when we are asked to reflect about our identities.

When I would visit Miami after living in Chicago, I found the people—my family, friends, extended family, friends of friends—to be complacent, driven by the party lifestyle or the grind of working to survive without critical engagement for the structural oppression and growing poverty faced by working class communities. I didn’t know how to engage in surface conversations or ignore these blatant issues and as a result home became inhospitable. I thought of never returning and as I earned more degrees, I became “that” person in my family—the one who would call them out about their racist and sexist “jokes,” comments, and ideas. The academy gave my beloveds a way to see me as different, “changed,” and an excuse to try to silence me. In reality, what they wanted to silence is the racism and intersecting oppression they were made to confront in our interactions. I always had a deep sense that racism had no place in my life, but it was all around me; culturally normalized in my community’s language, expressions, and expectations. Yet, that’s how insidious colonialism and white supremacy are, it alienates entire collectives—its dynamics even alienated me from my family and my community, such that I have considered never returning home.

This process has been a journey to transform silence into language and action, and address the questions Audre Lorde poses, “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” (41). I want to elucidate the tyrannies that the Latin American diaspora in Miami (and outside) pose and enact daily—that deep rooted anti-Blackness, the vestiges of nationalist blanqueamiento and mestizaje all meshed up with sexism and homophobia, including the fear of going home—because we need to make language for them or we will continue to sicken and die because of them; anti-Black racism is a sickness, a poison and we can and do have the antidote. The sickness is already visible and palpable as witnessed with the support of Trump’s white supremacist political and social campaign in the 2020 election, which saw Miami becoming an epicenter of white supremacist-racist politics. Yet, anti-critical race theory, anti-protest, and anti-masking policies speak to the urgency and the necessity to confront the manifestation and history of white supremacy in the specificity of this place I called home and now chose to return to. I hope to speak in tongues, as Anzaldúa urged us while quoting Moraga in Borderlands, and “to gain the word / To describe the loss / I risk everything” (54). This is a call to action, for those of us who have ties to Miami or want to care about what happens there. What are we going to do?

What would it mean to shift the geography of reason towards Miami, again, or for the first time, as an alienated academic now called back because the political moment asks to reconsider what does Miami mean for Latinx Studies, Caribbean studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies? How have we ignored the people and potential for engaging with this place for liberatory purposes? What are the tools we have that can be translated to build community towards liberation?

Milagros Ricourt in The Dominican Racial Imaginary argues there are simultaneous understandings of race within national boundaries,

there are different national imaginaries within the same national space-time framework—first, the colonized imaginary, representing the continuity of the colonial framework of power, and, second a subversive imaginary, defined by those who see themselves as black and ready to fight against slavery—thus exposing shifting discontinuities in the colonial racial cultural system (5).

Ricourt presents us with a choice: to side with the Euro-colonial majoritarian record, to adhere to the colonized imaginary, or to undo its damage by stoking the flames of the subversive imaginary, the maroon consciousness there all along. [1] Using all our training and passion for our work and taking it into our homes is to challenge the colonial, racist legacies we inherited. Going home, to Miami, both intellectually and physically means finding new ways of communicating, finding people who are doing this work already, not giving up, disillusioned, but seeking the subversive imaginary and doing something with it.


Notes

References

  • Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

  • Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1987.

  • Aranda, Elizabeth M., Sallie Hughes, and Elena Saboga. Making a Life in Multiethnic Miami: Immigration and the Rise of a Global City. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014.

  • Lorde, Audre. “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007: 40-44.

  • Ricourt, Milagros. The Dominican Racial Imaginary Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

  • Pelaez Lopez, Alan. “The X in Latinx is a Wound not a Trend.” Color Bloq: The Stories of Us, 2018.

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Dr. Maria Chaves Daza is a Latinx feminist scholar, and assistant professor in the Africana and Latinx Studies Department at SUNY Oneonta. They hold a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture program, and Doctorate in English from the Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric, both from SUNY-Binghamton University. Born in Colombia, they had the privilege to live in large immigrant cities like Miami and Chicago. These immigrant communities and the matriarchs of their family have given them the perspective and exposure to quotidian feminist practices which inspire their scholarly and community work. Their scholarship is invested in listening to the many ways women of color tell stories and work towards social justice.

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